Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

A graveslab that addresses its reader directly, by name, is unusual enough.

One lying in the choir of Cormac's Cathedral on the Rock of Cashel goes further still, closing a Latin inscription carved in Black Letter script with a personal appeal: "Now, gentle reader, I devoutly beseech you to say for his soul a pater and ave." The slab, just over two metres long and roughly half a metre wide, is a thin limestone rectangle, chamfered along its right and top edges, cracked across the face and again near the cross-head, and decorated in relief with a seven-armed segmental cross whose each arm terminates in a fleur-de-lis. Three cross-bands sit at the junction of the cross-head and stem; the base of the cross has largely broken away, leaving only a single surviving band where it once met its foot.

The inscription, transcribed and translated by FitzGerald in the early twentieth century, names the man beneath it as Patrick O'Kearny, a citizen of Cashel who died on the 27th of March, though the year is not legible. His body, the text states, rests before the Altar of Brigid inside the church, sharing that space with Honoria and another Patrick Kearny, presumably family members. The appeal to a "gentle reader" was a common medieval formula, inviting passers-by to offer prayers for the soul of the deceased, but its survival here, worn into the stone border of a slab that has lain undisturbed in one of Ireland's most visited medieval sites, gives it an odd intimacy. The inscription runs along three sides of the slab and continues down either side of the cross-shaft, filling the available surface with a careful economy of space. Black Letter, the dense Gothic script used across northern Europe from roughly the twelfth century onwards, would have been the standard formal hand of the period, and its use here suggests a craftsman familiar with ecclesiastical or administrative lettering conventions.

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